


Drabble Drabble Drabble (and the fic go marching on)

by Orockthro



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, Drabbles, F/M, Gen, Gender AU, M/M, Ten in Ten Challenge, Tumblr fills
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-09-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 04:06:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 2,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/921790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of self-contained micro stories, mostly from tumblr prompts and for the 10 in 10 challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Identically Charged Ions

Harold didn’t introduce them. He convinced himself it was because he wasn’t sure Nathan could keep himself from blowing his cover. But really, it was because Nathan and Grace were like identically charged ions, unable to touch. He was half convinced that when they met (if they met) there would be some sort of a cataclysmic, world altering event.

So he balanced them. It was easier than it should have been to convince Nathan he was just busy with the machine.

“We’re making a machine that will change the world, Nathan. It takes time.”

And Nathan eventually stopped asking him to go out.

Grace was harder, or maybe it just felt that way because there weren’t years of history to fall back on. She didn’t push when he cited frequent business trips, nor did she question the brush offs about his job.

“It’s okay, Harold. I’ve had to sign non-disclosure agreements for magazines before. I know how cut-throat businesses can be.” And then she’d kiss him, lightly, on the corner of his mouth, just as a reminder.


	2. Kick The Generator 1.0

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "I have a powerful desire for dystopian futures..."

They stay in the library. Its abandoned lower floors and the single staircase that lead up to their base of operations make it a defendable location, John tells him. Harold is half sure he’s lying, but the comfort of the library keeps him from questioning it. It’s a gift.

“Shaw’s getting water. She should be back soon.”

The world is dark. Decima ravaged the machine, and the machine fought back. In the end the army dropped EMPs all across the country. It’s been dark for a week now, and it’s looking less and less likely that the army will relinquish control. They drop filers from hot air balloons, hand written, of course; they’ve recruited school children for copying.

It is for the safety of the public, the fliers read. So much as a single blip of electric life could harbor the machine. Until they found a way to kill it (the government’s wording, not his - Harold would never call it alive) every citizen must make life without technology, without electricity, a reality.

“They’re salting the earth,” John says.

Riots in the streets are a natural next step. John barricades them in, and he and Ms. Shaw take to thieving supplies in the night.

On the fourth night he grabs John’s elbow and begs him to find Grace. “Please, Mr. Reese?” He’s lost now, without his computers. They’re just hunks of plastic and metal, but he hasn’t removed them from his desk. They sit there like grave markers.

“Of course, Finch,” John says, and he disappears down the stairs in the black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This tumblr drabble is what started my much, much larger and more involved fic, Kick the Generator.


	3. The Coffee Shop

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Something cute with Reese and Finch. And Bear. Like going to a coffee shop..."

“You know, I do enjoy drinks other than green tea,” Harold says when John brings him yet another perfectly sweetened Sencha from the street vendor near Grace’s apartment. “And they don’t all have to be from the same shop.”

This, he will realize later, is the moment it begins.

The next day Reese brings an earl gray latte from Starbucks. He must have gotten it from a branch nearby, because it’s piping hot. Harold scoffs at the chain, and John watches him like he’s recording the entire conversation in his mind. “I prefer two percent milk over skim,” he says, if only to give John something to work with.

The hazelnut steamer, from a local shop called Ground and Steeped, is acceptable, but too sweet. John watches his mouth as he speaks.

Then there’s a number which takes all of their time for two days, and when it’s resolved John is covered in ice packs, and Harold just wants to sleep for a week. But Bear requires walks, so he pushes himself out of his chair stiffly and marches to the gate. Despite bruising that covers a generous fifth of his body, John is right behind them. Harold tisks at him, but he got used to John ignoring his advice a long time ago.

They go to a dog park and sit on a bench, not moving an inch while Bear runs himself tired. Then, exhausted, they fall into a coffee shop. If the owner decides Bear is an aid dog, he does nothing to discredit the assumption.

Harold blinks and John has set a mug in front of him. They’re in a booth near the door; John has a clear line of sight to all the exits, and Harold is happy to have the weight off his leg. He takes a deep sip, closes his eyes, and lets the flavors run across his tongue. “Chai. It’s good.”

John smiles, exhausted and open and honest.


	4. Baseball

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Finch/Reese. Another rainy day outing."

“The numbers never stop coming, Mr. Reese,” he’d said. But there are still hours, days sometimes, when the machine is quiet. During these quiet moments Finch can breathe again, because he’s free from it, even if it’s just for a day.

John takes it upon himself to entertain them during the lulls. First it’s the movies when it rains, then it’s a baseball game on a day it’s 70 degrees and sunny. He watches Finch in a way that would be casual, except it isn’t at all, and hands him a stadium hot dog. Finch promptly passes it along to Bear, but Reese just smiles.

When it rains again and they are between numbers, Reese pulls out an old radio from somewhere in the library and tunes it into another baseball game. It’s a clunky thing, with dials, an analogue readout, and a long, telescoping antenna. He puts out peanuts and m&ms and sets up a poker match.

“Do you think you can beat me, Mr. Reese?”

“No,” John says. He loses six hands in a row before the second inning, but doesn’t stop smiling.


	5. Dancing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Reese and Finch, slow dancing in the library?

“Ms. Marcell will be meeting you at the Bellarius club tonight at seven. I’ve arranged for her to meet her ‘blind date’ on the dance floor.” Harold looked up from the computer, his fingers frozen on the keys. “You do know how to dance formally, of course?”

Reese didn’t answer. He was standing with his back to him, peering out the window, pointedly looking everywhere but at Harold.

“It’s no matter, Mr. Reese. I’m sure I can teach you the basics in the next two hours.”

Finally Reese turned from the window and narrowed his eyes at him. “I was an international spy, Finch—”

“Yes, I know, and it did wonders for your card playing.” Harold pushed himself from his chair and briskly walked to John. The height difference would play in their favor this time. He snagged one of John’s hands in his own and guided John’s other to the small of his back. “Good. We’d better start with the waltz, I think.”


	6. Vision

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Reese/Finch, vision

The street signs are a blur. His glasses come off when an idiot kid (John’s words, not his) by the name of Patrick Lemon shoves him against a dumpster and smacks him across the temple. John has Harold by the arm in a second and frog marches him out of the alley before Finch can even feel the sting or taste the blood from his split lip. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a dark, fuzzy lump on the ground that can only be Lemon.

“Mr. Reese, did you have to incapacitate him entirely?”

John’s grip on his arm is hard. Harold doesn’t think he’d be able to wrench himself free if he tried, but the thought is abstract; he has no desire or intention to pull away. He lets himself be led blindly.

“He hit you, Harold,” John says, as if that is explanation enough for his display of excessive violence. And maybe it is.

John weaves them across a street, most likely 112th, but he can’t be sure. It’s distracting, to be unable to make out the faces and expressions of the people who swarm around them. He’s always treasured his own anonymity, but the reversal is off putting. Harold finds himself hanging onto the arm around him for balance. Even when they get to the car, he doesn’t let go.


	7. A Haircut for a Gentleman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "How about John going to Wendy's salon (the pretty red head from Number Crunch) before his and Harold's first date?"

She doesn’t expect to see him again, judging from her her wide eyes and the pen that’s frozen mid air in her hand. Her hair is still red and wavy, but she looks softer now, comfortable behind the salon’s reception desk.

“Have time for a walk-in, Wendy?”

She whisks him away to the back with the same efficiency he remembers from his first visit. “Laura, cover for me up front, okay?” she says with no room for negotiation, and drapes a vinyl cape around him.

“There’s not… a problem, is there?” She says against his ear while she leans down to grab a spray bottle. It’s subtle enough for their current situation, but John thinks he should teach her some nuances.

“No problem.” He smiles disarmingly at her through the mirror. “Just need a haircut. I’ve been told I should sharpen up.”

She relaxes easily; he thinks he’ll have to teach her about paranoia too, but maybe Finch would be better for that subject.

“Got a hot date?” She asks with a too-wide grin. It’s nerves probably, a set of questions she asks everyone to sooth the awkward silences. Silences that were too easily filled with half-remembered gunshots and bags of money.

“He made me a new suit,” he says instead of ‘yes,’ because ‘yes’ is too simple.


	8. Carla

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carla Elias stands in front of her father and says, “he needed to be taught respect.”

Carla Elias wears pleated skirts because that’s what good Catholic Italian girls are supposed to wear and she needs to be a good Catholic Italian girl. And when she kicks the teeth out of Billy’s head, it doesn’t show too badly on the navy wool.

She stands in front of her father and says, “he needed to be taught respect.”

The don washes the blood off his hands and wipes them dry on one of the restaurant’s white silk napkins, but she lets the stain set deep under her fingernails. His teeth had been the first to go, but once she started hitting she didn’t stop until his nose was pulpe under the heels of her hands. She’s not in a rush to forget the crunch of bone. It was necessary and she relishes the necessary.

Her father watches her and chews on a cigar. He doesn’t smoke it. He says he quit and she smiles when he tells her, because she can smell the lie just as clearly as she can smell the smoke. “You’re alright, kid. Welcome to the family.”

That night she falls asleep in a queen sized bed and in the morning a man named Luca brings her orange juice and french toast on a wooden bed table. He sits with her while she eats it and turns his back when she shrugs on the silk robe hung across the footboard of the bed and treats her like a princess.

She decides that when she kills her father and all his men and takes it all for herself, she’ll let Luca live.

 


	9. She Names Him

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the 10 in 10 challenge. Writing Kara has to be the most fun I've had in awhile. I clearly need to include her in other fic.

Kara fucks him. Reese is the one who shoves her against a wall and kisses her lips raw, but it was never him making the decisions. She _named_ him, and when she says his name in bed, he glows.

“Get dressed,” she tells him once she’s come and he’s spent and laying on the dead stranger’s sofa. “We have a flight to catch.”

They kill eight terrorists in their beds the following week, and they rip each other’s clothes off before they make it back to the dumpy hotel they’re staying in, under a cover as newlyweds. She tells him to lay down, and he lays. He looks up at her with his big blue boyscout eyes and waits, patiently, without touching.

“What’s your name?”

“ _Reese_ ,” he says like a prayer, and she takes his hands and guides them to her.

She knows, later, when he’s seen his old flame, that civilian. She knows because he looks at her like she’s a poisoned well.

She grins at him and bites his shoulders when he strips off his blood stained shirt that night and slips into the shower. He turns away from her at first, but not for long.  

She is a poisoned well, and so is he. It’s past time he realized it.  


	10. Burned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kara's been burned many, many times. AU drabble set post Dead Reckoning.

( _four_ )

Kara hates the smell of burn wards, the stench of antiseptic and artificial mint. The smell of burned flesh is more familiar and she wishes they’d stop trying to cover it up.

This time Greer has the decency to not show up, not to flaunt her failure. She expects him to, but he never comes. She’s outlived her usefulness. Again. But this time she has a name. It’s burned into her mind now.

She lays still and waits as the doctors stitch together the skin on her face and pull out the shredded remains of the CDs that had been in the glovebox from her chest. She waits as they wrap her arms with gauze and prod the marble sized chunks missing from her inner thighs where the half full water bottle exploded against her legs. She waits until they leave for the night on a Friday and turn the lights off, joking about a football game. And she sits up.

It hurts, almost as much as Mark smiling in the rearview mirror, and it takes her until the night guard gets up all four flights of stairs before she makes it the four steps to the door. But she’s still fast enough to kill him in under four seconds.

She passes a mirror on her way out, wearing the guard’s clothes even though they’re a loose fit. She looks different. Raw, pink, and like a new woman; a woman burned.

  
  


( _three_ )

She gives herself three days to heal. If it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for her, and she spends hours on end soaking in a cold bath and studying herself in the mirror.

The rivers of water that spill off her skin mimic the curves of scars that run up her jawline and through her hair. It’s cut short now, singed off in places, shaved off in the still-swollen patches that are filled with careful stitches.

She doesn’t recognise herself anymore. But it doesn’t matter because she has a name, and when she stands up from the tub and lets the water run down her legs onto the floor, she walks naked to the computer and types “Harold Finch” one key at a time.

  
  


( _two_ )

She gets looks now. People double take on the street, check to make sure she’s exactly as damaged as they thought. She’s ugly, scarred and with skin that’s still peeling off, tight and shiny underneath. She could wear makeup to cover the difference in skin tones, put on a scarf to hide the exposed black stitches across her scalp. Kara likes the stares from strangers, though. She used to get them because she was beautiful; she prefers being something people are afraid of.

“Coffee. Black,” she says to the woman behind the counter. The woman doesn’t make eye contact.

“Make it two,” a light voice behind her says. “And mine with cream.”

  
  


( _one_ )

The woman looks like Kara used to: wavy dark hair, clear brown eyes, smooth skin. She smiles. “I hear you’re looking for someone,” she says as she pays for their coffees, and she stares straight into Kara’s ugly face. “I can find him, but I need help from someone with your... skill sets.”

She can kill this woman in eight ways without getting creative. But she doesn’t smash the napkin dispenser into her skull.

“Maybe I just want a coffee,” Kara says. The coffee sloshes out of the paper cup when she brings it to her mouth, and it scalds her hand, but it's just one more burn. 

“Who says you can’t have both?” The woman winks. “You can call me Root.”


	11. Tracking Devices

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the 10 in 10 challenge

“Really, Finch?” He dangles the watch in front of the computer monitor. It’s not as ostentatious as the one Pierce had tried to fob off on him, but it’s clearly worth a small fortune. And the glinting GPS device isn’t even hidden under the crystal face.  

“Yes, Mr. Reese? Did you have something to ask me?” The raised eyebrow is a challenge.  

“Nevermind,” he says, and slips the watch onto his wrist. It fits snugly enough that it won’t slide when he’s running, and the crystal face is scratch proof; considerate, in his line of work. Almost instantly the weight becomes familiar. He never used to wear watches (they felt too much like handcuffs) but this feels different. Less a foreign object, and more a reminder.

In return, Finch only pauses for the barest second when John carefully sets a new pair of cufflinks on the table in front of the keyboard along side their morning tea and coffee.  They’re silver, to better match with the majority of his suits, and the trackers sit on display like gemstones. If together the cufflinks and the watch appear to be a matched set, John will plead coincidence.

“I take it...” Finch trails off and licks his lips as he rolls the cufflinks in his hands. “Thank you, John,” he says, and he has a far off look on his face.  Something blooms in Reese when Harold immediately takes off the old pair and replaces them.

“New Number?”

Finch tips his head and hmms. “No, actually. I was thinking we might go to the movies. If that’s alright with you, of course?”

John reaches for Harold’s coat hanging on the rack behind. “I’ll get the umbrella.” 


End file.
